Intelligent AdGroup Sorting Can Increase CTR and ROI

How you sort your AdGroups and put your text ads and keywords inside them can make all the difference between a successful campaign and a total dud. In this article, you’ll learn why AdGroup sorting is so important and the optimal way in which to sort your AdGroups.

Why Is AdGroup Sorting So Important?

The easiest way to think of AdGroups is as groups of keywords. You take one group of keywords and tell Google what ad(s) to display for that group of keywords.

AdGroup sorting is critical because it’s not just your keywords or your ads that matter. How you match up those keywords to those ads is also critical.

If you have too many keywords that are very different in one AdGroup, your ads won’t be targeted enough. People who see your ads won’t feel like you’re talking to them but that you’re speaking generally. That will result in lower CTRs and lower ROIs.

Putting all or way too many keywords in one AdGroup is a common mistake made by beginners. Doing this will almost always kill your CTR.

What Is the Optimal Way to Organize Your AdGroups?

In an ideal world, the most optimal way to organize an AdGroup would be one keyword per AdGroup. That would allow you to write the most targeted advertisement that’s possible for that keyword. Every single keyword would have the best possible ad. Your CTRs would be much, much higher than if you had many keywords grouped in a single AdGroup.

However, that may not always be possible. If you have five thousand keywords and you need to write two ads for each keyword, that’s ten thousand ads. That’ll take months to write.

The ideal grouping would, instead, be one keyword per AdGroup for small campaigns; and for larger campaigns, group as many keywords per AdGroup as it takes to make the campaign realistic to build, while still keeping keywords grouped only with highly similar keywords.

Keep your AdGroups tight. Write highly targeted ads. In addition to getting higher CTRs, it also gives you a nice bonus: you’ll be able to put the exact keyword in your ad. This will cause that part of your ad to be bolded in Google’s search results. This will further increase your CTRs.

How do you sort your AdGroups in this manner? If you have a campaign with more than 100 keywords, you’ll pretty much have to use a spreadsheet upload. It’s very hard to do large campaigns any other way. Even AdWords Editor will be too slow for large campaigns when you’re doing one keyword per AdGroup or near one keyword per AdGroup.